Offering a conservative counterbalance to the extreme left-coast liberalism of The Huffington Post

Friday, January 13, 2012

IS RON PAUL A FAERIE QUEEN

!!!!

A crawl through the fairy dust

By Wesley Pruden

George McGovern promised to “crawl on my knees” to
Hanoi to quit the war in Vietnam. That didn’t win many friends among the
grunts who fought the war designed by all those Harvard men, and Mr.
McGoo’s campaign crashed and burned to the applause of nearly everyone
in that distant year of 1972.

No one has accused Ron Paul of being a crawler, but
he sometimes channels Mr. McGoo with his angry rhetoric against the wars
in the Middle East. If he were president, he said last summer, he would
bring home the new generation of grunts from Afghanistan “as quickly as
the ships could get there.” Ships would find it hard going in
land-locked Afghanistan, but we take his point.

But Mr. Paul has been nothing if not consistent, and he has
consistently pushed himself to the margins of the national debate with
his prescription for retreat into the Twilight Zone, where the world’s
bad guys would roam unmolested by American arms. You might reasonably
think this would make him a pariah among the young professionals who
bear those arms in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Mr. McGovern didn’t win many friends among the grunts who fought the war in Vietnam.

But you would think wrong. Mr. Paul boasted in an
interview with PBS “News Hour” that he’s the favorite, by one
measurement, of the men and women serving in the military in the region.

“It’s insane what we’re doing [in the Middle East],” he said. “And
I’ll tell you one thing about this business with the military. We just
had a quarterly [campaign finance] report, and they listed all the money
that all the candidates got from the military. I got twice as much as
all the other candidates put together on the Republican side, and even
more than [President] Obama got, which tells me that those troops want
to come home as well, because they know exactly what I’m talking about.”

Figures compiled by the Federal Election Commission, which identifies
donations by the donors’ employers, confirm the particulars of his
boast. During the second quarter of 2011, for one example, Ron Paul
received $25,000 from members of the military services. Six other
Republican candidates received almost $9,000 during this reporting
period, and Barack Obama pulled in $16,000.

Ron Paul says the troops just want to come home, and he’s no doubt
right. For soldiers, like everyone else, there’s no place like hearth
and home, be it ever so humble. But the men and women in Afghanistan are
professionals and volunteers, sworn to go where they’re told to go.
Like everyone else they make private judgments about the why and
wherefore.

David French, who soldiered with an armored cavalry squadron in Iraq,
observes in National Review Online that the wars in the Middle East
have taught many American soldiers to be cynical. (Others would call
them skeptical.) They’ve learned that the region “is a savage place that
views human life cheaply and will never, ever be worth fighting to
change.”

They feel betrayed by “good-idea fairies,” idealists whose good but
unrealistic intentions get good soldiers killed by misplaced idealism
and Sesame Street multiculturalism. Soldiers are accustomed to blunt,
to-the-point talk, and that’s how Ron Paul talks. Some of them send him a
few bucks from their Saturday-night beer money.

Many of these men in “the boots on the ground” have listened to the
moonshine dispensed by the men who sent them on fool’s errands in the
Middle East, from George W. Bush and his theological assurance that
“Islam is a religion of peace” to Barack Obama’s craven tours of the
Islamic world, bowing and apologizing for being an American. Ron Paul’s
rhetoric, if you don’t listen to much of it, can sound pretty good. The
soldiers don’t hear soft words, but hear someone “telling it like it
is.”

Men dispatched to fight the fights disdained by “good-idea fairies”
have small tolerance for the fairy dust the politically correct sprinkle
on reality. When the Pentagon announced this week that a new aircraft
carrier strike group had arrived in the Arabian Sea, where Iran has
threatened to close the Strait of Hormuz to disrupt oil shipments, and
that another carrier was on the way, a spokesman insisted that the
maneuvering of the carriers was mere coincidence.
“I don’t want to leave anybody with the impression that we’re somehow
[speeding] two carriers over there because we’re concerned about what
happened,” the Pentagon spokesman said. Well, of course not.

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About Me

A Texan who loves the truth and hates the lying, cheating, and deliberate prevarication that characterizes so much of our civic discourse these days.
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RIPOSTE, n. 1. Fencing: a quick thrust after parrying a lunge 2. a quick sharp return in speech or action; counterstroke.
- The Random House Dictionary of the English Language...........
You can contact me by sending an email to me at: leorugiens23@gmail.com